


So No One Told You Earth Was Gonna Be This Way

by 51PegasiB



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: But not in a scary way, Dick Pics, Gen, Humor, Non-Consensual Body Modification, alien social mores, versus human social mores
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 13:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22496941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/51PegasiB/pseuds/51PegasiB
Summary: I've been mentally thinking about this series as the Venom sitcom we deserve, but won't get through official channels. I hope to update on Fridays.I suck at titles, and had a whole internal debate about what sitcom's theme song to reference here.
Relationships: Eddie Brock & Venom Symbiote
Comments: 22
Kudos: 54





	1. Try Drinking From The Opposite Side Of The Glass

Eddie started feeling the twitches during the morning huddle. He did his best to ignore the random spasms and listened to Phyl and pitched his stories when his turn came around. 

As soon as they were free, he made a run for the bathroom, doing a cursory check to make sure no one else was in there. When he was sure they were alone he swiveled to face the mirrors and hissed at his other, “What the fuck are you doing?” 

**It is nothing to worry about.**

“It is really distracting,” Eddie responded in an emphatic whisper. “My knee doesn’t usually do that.”

**I know. I’m working on it.**

“We can’t have this situation. I can’t get into my body needing tech support!”

Venom paused.  **Isn’t that what Dan does?**

“Don’t change the subject! This is my job. I have to appear to be sane at my job. Or I won’t have one anymore.” 

Venom sent across something like an internal shrug. 

“We need a job to get clothes and pay rent and have chocolate.”

**Technically, we don’t.**

“Yes, we do.” 

**There are so many resources we let just...run around.**

Eddie sighed. They wound up having this argument at least once a week. Eating really bad guys was one thing. Eating nothing but and stealing whatever ill-gotten gains they had laying around was another. 

“I have already explained this like fifteen times. Unless we want to be trapped in Area 51 being experimented on or whatever, we have to keep a low profile.”

**That’s your excuse for everything.**

“Well eating people is your solution to everything and It’s not usually as great a one as you think.” Eddie’s knee gave another involuntary twitch, like he’d been hit by the little reflex-testing hammer they use at the doctor’s office.”Auugh. Why? You didn’t explain it.” 

Venom kept silent and a moment later one of his co-workers came through the door. Eddie washed his hands and left, still kind of seething at the patent ridiculousness of his post close-encounter life. 

He managed to kind of forget the twitching as the morning wore on, but it impinged on his awareness again at lunchtime. 

He sat under a tree in a park nearby with his paper food-truck tray where the general hubbub of San Francisco would cover him haranguing his other. 

“It’s still happening.” 

**I am aware of that.**

“Me too and I’d prefer not to be.”

**I’d prefer it if you weren’t, too. Maybe then you’d stop whining about it like a little bitch.**

“Anne wouldn’t like you saying that.”

**I learned it from your brain, Eddie.**

“Look, just… is there a timeline on getting it fixed?”

Venom was silent. 

“At least tell me what started it. I’m begging you.”

Eddie could feel the reluctance coming off V in waves. It was tinged with shame. 

“Hey, it’s okay, but like, I’ve lived in this body way longer than you have. Maybe I could actually help.”

**I don’t like failing.**

“So this isn’t something you did on purpose?”

**OF COURSE IT ISN’T!**

“Well how was I supposed to know?”

**If it bothers you it cannot be a success.**

“Well what were you trying to do?” 

**Your knees are so inefficient. I wanted to stabilize them and increase speed and potential for larger movements.**

“Okay, well nothing about that sounds categorically nuts. But something went wrong.”

**Yes. I was re-tuning tendons and one of the nearby muscles started to...spasm.**

“Sure. that would be the thing driving *me* categorically nuts.”

**Driving? You sure you are not at the destination?**

“Oh hah hah, interstellar sarcasm slime. You’re hilarious.” 

**In any case, the spasms haven’t ceased no matter what I do to try to get them to.**

“Well, you undid the tendon thing, right?” 

**Yes. And I tried loosening the tendon further.**

“Oooohkay. That might not be so good. Like - the whole system has to be balanced. When some muscles are tensing, other ones are untensing and stuff.”

**I know that. Do you think I’m a mere spawnlet?**

“Hey I don’t know what kind of hosts you’ve had before. Since someone is all squirrely about telling me.”

**The podcast I’ve been listening to said human custom dictates not bringing up your exes in a current relationship.**

“You bring up Annie all the time!”

**It said nothing about bringing up your partner’s exes.**

Eddie felt an edge of hysterical laughter dancing in a corner of his brain. 

“Questions of relationship etiquette later. Let’s solve the spasm now. What else did you try?”

**I tried some things I read about. Like drinking a glass of water. And holding your breath. I didn’t try standing on your head or scaring you, because you said we couldn’t behave strangely in the office.**

“Standing on my...Vee, those are cures for hiccoughs.” 

**Hiccoughs are muscle spasms. We read all about them when you got them last month.**

The laughter was bleeding out of Eddie in random snorts now. “Well, hiccoughs are spasms but not all spasms are hiccoughs, buddy.”

**Why not?**

“They just aren’t. Other spasms don’t fuck up my breathing. They fuck up other stuff.”

**Well, what is the name for these spasms?**

“I don’t know. I don’t think they all have special names. Most of the time we just call them a cramp.”

**What should I do for a cramp?**

“Usually stretching, heat, massage...that sort of stuff.”

**Why are those things not what we do for hiccoughs?**

“Because the muscle that causes those is deep inside and we can't really effectively do those things to it.”

**Well...I could.**

Eddie stopped. “Huh. I guess you could. We can try that next time they happen to me.”

Vee seemed pleased. 

“For now, though, let’s see if some stretches will stop the knee from freaking out.” Eddie stood and discarded his tray before stretching his legs every which way. He could feel Vee doing something on the inside and the leg quickly loosened up and the knee stopped twinging, much to Eddie’s relief. 

“What have we learned today?” 

**Human language is stupid.**

“Or?”

**Human ligaments are stupid.**

“Or?”

**Human hiccough cures are stupid.**

Eddie was heading back to his office. “Okay, I will give you that one, but Vee. Check with me about body stuff if something isn’t working.”

**I’m pretty sure I know more about this meat than you do.**

“You might know different stuff, but I doubt you know *more*.”

**Oh yeah? Well what does THIS nerve cluster do?**

Eddie tripped over nothing and went down hard onto the pavement. “Ow. You motherucker.”

**OOps. Guess you were right. You know lots about...responding to gravity.**

“Vee, you *asshole*”

**Better stop talking to yourself. Time to look sane.** Vee responded as they picked themselves up off the pavement and headed in. 

“Mother. Fucker,” Eddie muttered, but then he shut up. He could only look sane with the motherfucker’s cooperation, after all. 


	2. Chapter 2

Dan hadn’t really thought things all the way through when he had told a space alien that they could text him any time. Venom had taken it to heart and then Dan had to do some damage control in the form of explaining why he didn’t always respond quickly.

“It was the middle of the night,” he said, on one occasion, in protest. And on another. “I was in the middle of surgery. I can’t always get to my phone when I’m up to my wrists in a human being."

“ **But it was an emergency.** ” Vee protested.

“Myoclonic jerks do not count as an emergency,” Dan replied. 

“ **Well, how was I supposed to know that?** ” 

Dan supposed, on balance, that Venom had a point, there. He did advise looking some things up but Venom was more susceptible to WebMD’s shitty diagnoses than most. 

Dan really wished that site had information about how prevalent & likely a given diagnosis was. But if they did, people would probably interpret it incorrectly anyway. 

For the whole two weeks since V had re-emerged into their lives, his phone had been going off at any and all hours. Once Dan had explained some human logistics, Venom no longer expected an immediate response, but he asked questions whenever he had them.

In any case, it wasn’t particularly surprising or alarming when his phone buzzed at 3am. He was just coming off of a late shift at the hospital and too wired to sleep, so he welcomed the distraction, if he was honest. 

EB: DAN THERE IS A PROBLEM. 

DL: Hi, V. Are we sure it’s a problem? 

EB: IT IS NOT SUBSIDING LIKE THE LEG TWITCHES. 

DL: How long has it been going on?

EB: TWENTY FIVE MINUTES. I TIMED IT. AND THIS IS THE THIRD TIME IT’S HAPPENED TONIGHT.

DL: Well, what is it? Still might not be a problem. 

EB: THERE IS AN UNUSUAL SWELLING IN SOME OF EDDIE’S TISSUES 

DL: Doesn’t sound good. Which tissues?

EB: HANG ON.

Dan had initial trouble parsing the photo that came through. When it resolved itself into something that made sense, he groaned. Eddie was going to be so pissed. There, illuminated by flash and wreathed in grey sheets and black tentacles was undoubtedly a perfectly ordinary erection. 

Well...maybe *ordinary* was a strong word. But it definitely wasn’t an emergency. 

DL: That’s perfectly normal, V.

EB: IT HAS NOT HAPPENED ON PREVIOUS NIGHTS. 

DL: It’s a sometimes thing, but it’s not a problem. It’s more likely to happen when a human is less stressed and being well taken care of. So, if anything, the fact that it has started to happen means you’re doing a good job. 

EB: REALLY? 

DL: Yup. Either way it’s nothing to worry about unless it is actively painful or lasts more than four hours. 

EB: I WILL MONITOR, THEN. 

DL: It’s also not a good idea to send a photo of that part of Eddie to just anybody. 

EB: YOU’RE NOT JUST ANYBODY. YOU ARE EDDIE’S DOCTOR. 

DL: True. 

EB: ANYHOW, EDDIE SAID SELFIES WERE OKAY. 

DL: This doesn’t count as a selfie, Bud. 

EB: WHY NOT? 

DL: Well…

Dan sighed. Maybe the distraction wasn’t worth all this. He didn’t mind dealing with the strictly medical questions but this was a whole morass of cultural stuff. 

DL: Ask Eddie when he wakes up. It’s...a long story. But in future check in with Eddie before you send out photos and in general do not send penis photos to anyone who hasn’t asked for them. It’s considered...rude. 

EB: ….

EB: OK

EB: YOUR HUMAN BULLSHIT IS SO ARBITRARY. ONE PATCH OF SKIN IS SO DIFFERENT FROM ANOTHER, APPARENTLY. 

DL: Yep. We’re weird.

EB: THANK YOU, DAN.

DL: No problem. 

Dan laughed to himself and finally felt able to get to sleep. He laughed again when he had fifteen notifications from Eddie in the morning. Most of which were on the theme of murdering his other. 

DL: Nothing I haven’t seen, before. Don’t worry.

EB: Well, you didn’t need to see mine. 

DL: Already had. Don’t you remember being in a gown at the hospital? You were too out of it to get that way on your own. 

EB: Aww, jeeze. Didn’t need to think about that. 

DL: Sorry.

Dan snickered his way to the coffee machine. Doctoring for an alien was never dull.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What dark and sinister being lurks in this SF apartment? Dunno, but it's thirsty.

In the middle of the night, a black pseudopod oozed out of the person on the bed. It groped its way through the mess on the floor and out to the kitchenette of the open-plan apartment.

Light shone off its amorphous edge as it oozed along the battered wooden boards. 

Mice may have fled the first time this happened. The smart ones never came back. The stupid had already fallen to the mass of the alien who snuck through the apartment every night. 

The extruded appendage stretched thinner and thinner as it reached for the sink, the power of its tip decreasing proportionally with how far it stretched itself. By the time it wrapped around the handle of the spigot, it had spread itself too thin and there was too much mass spread out behind it. It couldn’t lift both itself and the handle. It shuddered in frustration and strained again, moving the handle a bit, but not enough to bring so much as a trickle out of the spout. 

The mass contracted back into itself, pulling back towards the bed, but then diverted before it reached the warm cocoon of warm blooded human and cotton sheets. 

Instead they reached sideways into the tiny bathroom. They pulled down on the lever on white and stuck their pod deep into the swirling water, enjoying the refreshing feel as they drank the flowing water therein.

They pulled the lever several more times before they’d had their fill, then oozed back into the bed, contentedly wrapping around the human they found there. 

The next day, when Eddie awoke, he was alarmed to step in a puddle on the threshold of the bathroom. 

“Dammit, Vee. Have you been drinking from the toilet again? I left out a glass of water.”

“It’s not fresh!” Venom protested. 

“I’m going to start putting those cleaning tablets in the toilet tank and then maybe you’ll stop.”

His other whined in protest. 

“The water in the toilet definitely is not fresh either,” Eddie tried again. 

“I like it. It’s nice and cool.”

Eddie let his head thud back into the wall. 

“Hey. Don’t injure the brain. It’s a pain in the ass to fix,” Vee said sternly.

“So is my stomach when I get grossed out at the weird shit you do.”

“Humans are way weirder than I am...on the galactic scale,” Vee said. 

“I don’t have a galactic scale,” Eddie replied, putting a truly aggressive amount of toothpaste on the brush to try to clean even the concept of toilet water out of his head. 

“Oh, trust me. I know,” Vee said sardonically. 

“Hey. We’re evolved monkeys.” 

“Evolved into pants. Itty bitty fuzzy human pants.”

“There’s nothing itty bitty about my pants,” Eddie protested.

“Well, on the GALACTIC scale…”

“Veeeeeeee,” Eddie whined.

“Oh all right. Your pants are well-filled by your genitalia and any female of compatible species would be well pleased by discovering their contents."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vee is concerned about everything Eddie leaves behind without noticing.

“Eddie. You keep leaving things everywhere,” Vee complained.

He felt so blindsided by the symbiote, sometimes. They had been watching tv most of the afternoon, after a very late night of chasing some drug runners off the coast. Swimming after cigarette boats at top speed through the bay didn’t exhaust him, but de-venomming while still in the water and getting soaked in the freezing cold water and then walking up dark streets through fog and a strong wind to get home because his phone was dead sure as hell did. 

“What are you talking about? Where did I leave things? I’ve been sitting right here. You’ve been watching tv with me.” Eddie scrubbed his fingers through his hair and sighed. He stood and shuffled to the fridge to grab a beer, to Vee’s rumbling discontentment. 

Vee, however, would not be derailed. 

“You’re doing it *right now* Eddie. You just left hair all over the sofa. And there are skin cells in every crevice of the sofa.”

Eddie blinked and popped the cap off the bottle. It took him till the middle of a sip for his brain to catch up to what his other had said. 

“Wait. What? Skin cells?” 

“Skin cells. Hair. Blood. Plasma. Even gametes. So much valuable matter and DNA information just...on the floor everywhere you go.” 

“Yeah. Uh. The blood is mostly ‘cause of our...nighttime habits. But the rest of it is just normal.” 

“Normal?” Venom’s tiny head stalk swiveled to face him. He hissed out the word again. “NORMAL?”

“Yeah. Just...how we get rid of dead cells.” 

“You should recycle them like any sane species.” 

“We kind of do,” Eddie tried to say, but Vee was still orating.

“I mean, the gamete emissions almost made sense to me, I thought they were placed in wait for females of your species to absorb through their skin.”

Eddie nearly spit out his beer. “Nope. Doesn’t work like that at all.”

“I know. They can’t even live outside of one set of reproductive organs or the other. So ridiculously fragile. No wonder you produce so many of them.” 

“That’s just...testicles that produce that many. Ovaries…”

Vee interrupted him. “I know. The spawn-carriers are much more judicious about where they leave their genetic material. They don’t just drop it into tissues and sheets.” 

Eddie snorted. “Yeah, I’m indiscriminate that way.”

“It’s a risk leaving pieces of yourself around everywhere.”

“Why?” 

“What if someone steals your genes?”

“Why would they do that?” 

“If they had your full code they could mind control you, target your genome for extinction or even just exploit your natural weaknesses.”

Eddie took another swig of his beer. “Uh, not on this planet, buddy.” 

“You’re saying sequencing technology isn’t available here? I know that’s not true. I read the news.” 

“Yeah, it is, but the rest of that technology sure as shit doesn’t. We’re safe from mind control and targeted death.” 

Vee settled into disgruntled silence at this. Eddie turned the sound back up on the tv and got through most of the rest of his beer before Vee spoke again. 

“It’s still messy,” he griped. 

Eddie chuckled. “It’s not like I can help it.”

“Well, I could help you help it.” 

“You shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Humans' sloughed-off epithelials are part of what helps plant life thrive on this planet. Our dead skin is really good for growing green things.”

“Well, we only have that one plant and it’s not doing so hot, in spite of your dust everywhere.”

“Yeah, well, maybe my skin just isn’t good enough for it.” 

Vee regarded him again with a steely white stare. “Maybe we should just deliver more cells to it,” he said. 

Eddie got to finish watching the stupid movie he had been watching while Venom sank into cracks and crevices all over the apartment and added a whole new layer of dirt to the pot with the poor plant in his windowsill. The dirt was now mounded around its stem, domed out of the pot. 

“We’re going to need more plants if you’re going to keep shedding everywhere,” Vee grumbled. 

“All right. What kind do you want?”

“What kind are there?”

The evening devolved into a houseplant research spiral and resulted in a big addition to his credit card balance, but an enthusiastic and delighted symbiote, so Eddie considered it a fair trade. 

As they sank into bed (at a much more reasonable hour than the night before) Eddie was just starting to really relax when Vee spoke up. “None of that explains the indiscriminate gamete scattering.” 

Eddie groaned. So much for sleep. 


End file.
